TO ELISABETH GREENE (LATER DENNYS)

c/o Police H.Q. | Freetown, | October 15 [1942]

Dear Elisabeth,

I’ve just got your letter of Sep. 19. I’m so sorry things have not gone too well. Things can be hell, I know. The peculiar form it’s taken with me the last four years has been in loving two people as equally as makes no difference, the awful struggle to have your cake and eat it, the inability to throw over one for the sake of the other…. This, of course, is confidential. Yours is different and I imagine just as hellish. I always used to laugh at emotional situations and feel they couldn’t any of them beat toothache. One lives and learns.

You say you’d like any suggestions, though as you quite rightly say other people’s suggestions are no bloody good. My own feeling is that climate can play the absolute devil with things: the whole atmosphere of a place like this is artificial in the extreme and I imagine it’s a bit the same with you. A kind of feverish mental sexuality with much impaired vitalities. People talking the whole time and the doing not so hot. (Here comes a tornado – blast it: I’d much rather have a blitz than a bad thunder-storm). And that’s hellishly wearing on the nerves. I don’t personally suffer from it because my life is too complicated to want any further complications.

What I’m circuitously getting at is that I’d humbly and probably impracticably suggest that you, as it were, break off officially with the mutual understanding that you’ve no objection to his making love to you again whether you are engaged or not if he wants to when you are both back in a reasonable climate – put it up to your respective parents that you’ve decided that it’s better to wait and see whether you like each other when circumstances are normal. Then make head office give you over-lapping leaves. Not leaves at the same time, that’s too purposeful like making a date to sleep with a new lech on a certain day.

Of course, I don’t know what your relations with Rodney are, but remember that if you are just engaged, even in a temperate climate a man can lose about five of his skins … I remember ghastly headaches … I’m assuming for the sake of argument that you are just engaged. In which case, for God’s sake, remember that it’s a distinct possibility to fall badly in love after sleeping with a man, and that’s the kind that goes on. A man improves enormously too under that treatment in the way of nerves, thin-skinnedness, sociability and the like. Only, of course, it mustn’t be done as an ‘experiment’, but because one’s feeling cheerful and a little drunk perhaps and in the mood…. I’m rambling on and teaching you to suck eggs. I’m sorry.

I had about two months ago a violent quarrel with my local boss and resigned. I was supported on the point at issue and offered a new position for which I was totally unfitted by lack of languages, though it would have been most interesting. I’m not quite sure or not whether I’m now going home under a cloud. I think not as I am not being replaced. This is a quite useless spot. Anyway you’ll probably hear of me yet cleaning latrines on Salisbury Plain.

[…]

Much love and I hope things improve one way or another.
Graham

Reading this over I feel it’s an awful flow of platitudes already familiar. I’m getting rapidly middle-aged in this climate. Forgive them.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 679